I received my M.Sc. from the Technical University Delft in the Applied Physics Department on the subject of Statistical Pattern Recognition and Image Processing.

After that I got my Ph.D. from the same university, but now in the Department of Industrial Design Engineering, which was quite different, but fun to do. My Ph.D. research was focussed on human perception: I had to model saliency and conspicuity in images (using methods from Computer Vision) and test these models by for example monitoring eye movements.

As a postdoc I worked at Caltech, Pasadena, in the lab of Bela Julesz. I did much more psychophysics there and also learned a lot about artificial neural networks (Christof Koch), real brains (David van Essen) and autonomous planetary rovers (Charlie Anderson, JPL).

Back in the Netherlands, I came in the Autonomous Systems Group of the University of Amsterdam, and started a group on computational intelligence in autonomous systems. From 1995 till now I supervised 8 Ph.D. theses, on topics as neural networks, visual navigation and distributed camera surveillance. On the latter topic I have a patent, and a product is being developed. My current Ph.D. projects focus on sensor data fusion, activity recognition and vision based robot mapping. Together with Vanessa Evers I work on Human Robot Interaction, we we jointly supervise a Ph.D. student.

Currently my main activities are focused on my position as 'lector' at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, which is an institute for higher professional education. I lead a group in the Computer Science department on the topic of 'Digital Life' . Furthermore I am scientific director of the 'Creative Research Centre' which is responsible for the applied research activities of the School for Communication, Media and ICT.